Robots could become RACIST or SEXIST says report - ‘Prejudice is hard to reverse’

ARTIFICIAL intelligence could become racist and sexist, a shock new report has sensationally warned.

Computer science and psychology experts suggest discrimination could evolve in robots as it “could easily be exhibited by artificially intelligent machines”, according to a study from Cardiff University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The research found prejudice is not a human-specific phenomenon and machines could learn it from each other.

Based on computer simulations, the team discovered machines can learn from humans and then from their robot peers.

In a game, the computer-based AIs were asked to donate to someone on their own own team or in a different group based on the individual’s reputation.

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As the game went on and thousands of simulations were racked up, the researchers realised that AI was learning from its peers to only donate to others who were in a similar position.

It showed that the AI was “updating their prejudice levels by preferentially copying those that gain a higher short term payoff, meaning that these decisions do not necessarily require advanced cognitive abilities”.

Co-author of the study Professor Roger Whitaker, from Cardiff University’s Crime and Security Research Institute and the School of Computer Science and Informatics, said: “By running these simulations thousands and thousands of times over, we begin to get an understanding of how prejudice evolves and the conditions that promote or impede it.

“Our simulations show that prejudice is a powerful force of nature and through evolution, it can easily become incentivised in virtual populations, to the detriment of wider connectivity with others.

Robots could become RACIST or SEXIST says report - ‘Prejudice is hard to reverse’ (Image: GETTY)

“Protection from prejudicial groups can inadvertently lead to individuals forming further prejudicial groups, resulting in a fractured population.

“Such widespread prejudice is hard to reverse.

“It is feasible that autonomous machines with the ability to identify with discrimination and copy others could in future be susceptible to prejudicial phenomena that we see in the human population.”

The findings could be bad news for humans as robots will gain more and more power in the future.

AI will learn from other machines (Image: GETTY)

Chief economist from the Bank of England, Andy Haldane, said that AI will be in “thinking jobs” by 2045.

Mr Haldane told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “The first three industrial revolutions have been about largely machines replacing humans doing principally manual tasks, whereas the fourth will be different.

“All of a sudden it will be the machine replacing humans doing thinking things, as well as doing things.”